Other Networks Newsletter

Other Networks Newsletter (1981-1988) was published and edited by Stan Pokras and Seth Horwitz out of the Public Interest Media Project's office in the Northern Liberties section of Philadelphia. Its tagline was "A Newsletter About Networks of People." The first issues were laid out by hand with paper and scissors; subsequent issues took advantage of then-new desktop publishing technology. This metamorphosis in production was paralleled in the publication's content: E.g., earlier issues mentioned "multilogues", in which social networks were created by people sending snail-mail letters to one person who would then send out copies to all; later issues increasingly described uses of computers for interpersonal interconnection. All of this, of course, went out to the public far in advance of the advent of 21st-century tools like Facebook and Twitter.